WeChat Data Report – Summer 2017

From communicating with friends and performing complex payments, WeChat has been at the center of the digital revolution in the Chinese market. Each year, WeChat releases detailed reports on its performance and user behaviour with their analysis. Here’s a summary of the data in these reports.

Number of Users and Behavior:

WeChat has recorded daily active users to be over 877 million in June 2017 with over 20 million official accounts on the database. This is an increase of 21% from last year.

The app also recorded 600 million monthly active mobile payment users. Moreover, every day 50% of users use WeChat for an average of 90+ minutes. Another interesting point is that 30% of all time spent on mobile in China is on WeChat alone.

WeChat User Engagement

We now know how many users visit the app everyday. It’s time to take a look at what they do when they are online. The last year saw an increase of 67% total messages sent per day on WeChat with an average of 8 calls per month with over 65 mins of calls per month per user. Apart from sending messages, users are also reading content from official brand accounts. Ever month users read official account articles the length of a novel!

Users also send each other 28 red packets per user in a month with ¥580 sent each month per user.

WeChat in Overseas Travel

Over the last year, 135 million outbound travellers from China spent over $261 billion abroad with top destinations that included, Japan, USA, Thailand, S Korea, Australia and the United Kingdom. This has been largely possible due to businesses targeting Chinese customers as they travel abroad by simplifying payments. For businesses, 40% of Mobike rides are initiated from their WeChat mini program (other 60% being from their own app) Anoother addition is that, Moments ads targeting Chinese tourists abroad are officially opening up to all businesses from August.

As WeChat sees an increase of users everyday, it will be quite interesting to see how the platform grows beyond its current capabilities to make it an integral part of business and life in the Chinese market.